THE CRITICS
F
BOOKS
THE WHICH BLAIR PROJECT
A controversial prime minister seeks to define his legacy.
BY JOHN LANCHESTER
I t would be naïve to pick up the
memoir of a recenrly retired politi-
cian expecting total candor. This may
not be a law of nature-a lasting con-
tribution to the American literary
canon is Ulysses S. Grant's "Personal
Memoirs," written when the author
was dying and had no interest in doing
anything other than telling the truth-
but it's a sound rule of thumb. Today' s
retired politicians are usually trying to
rush out their memoirs before the win-
dow of interest has narrowed, and they
are more concerned with keeping se-
crets than with telling them. The re-
sulting books are often hard to get
through, and many of them are for
owning rather than for reading.
Tony Blair has already been a central
character in autobiographical works by
his wife, Cherie; by his spin doctor and
enforcer-in-chief, Alastair Campbell;
and by his consigliere, Peter Mandelson
(whose lively book, "The Third Man:
Life at the Heart of New Labour," has
spent weeks at the top of the U.K. best-
seller lists). We know quite a bit about
Blair: about his surprisingly sweary pri-
vate self and his offstage tendency to
dress like Austin Powers. We even know
that his fourth child was conceived at
B almoral, the Qyeen's Scottish castle,
because Cherie was too embarrassed to
pack contraception and have it unpacked
by the servants. Indeed, we may feel that
we have all the private detail we need,
which is just as well, because there is next
to none of it in Blair's new memoir, "A
Journey" (Knopf; $35).
70 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 13,2010
The book has been the beneficiary of
an unusual form of advance publicity, in
that its publication has been depicted in
a Roman Polanski movie, "The Ghost
Writer," based on a novel by Blair's ex-
friend Robert Harris. (Blair's reported
verdict on Harris: "a cheeky fuck.") In
that story, the Blair figure is living on
Marthàs Vineyard, hiding from possi-
ble war-crimes charges while a ghost-
writer puts together an account of his
life. There is a dark secret, and the for-
mer P.M.'s first and second ghostwrit-
ers are both murdered to keep it. This
fictional version turns out to be half
right. It is true that Blair's memoirs
keep his secrets well hidden; on the
other hand, it is not the writer but the
reader who will find the book deadly.
This tedium is not the result of a
merely predictable evasion. Some of the
events depicted in "A J oumey" remain
a matter of angry controversy. There's
an ongoing inquiry into the reasons for
Britain's participation in the invasion of
Iraq-it's Britain's third official inquiry
into events around the war, with a
fourth, concerning the use of torture,
also now underway. Nobody would ex-
pect to read here anything that diverged
from the tighrly held official narrative
of events. Nonetheless, Blair's reticence
on some subjects reaches mystifying
levels. On the six-hundred-and-eighti-
eth page of a six-hundred-and-eighty-
two-page book that consists almost en-
tirely of detailed accounts of politics,
Blair writes, "I have always been more
interested in religion than politics." It is
just about the only mention of religion
in the book. Blair nowhere says what
his religious beliefs are, and nowhere
discusses how they affect his politics or
his decision-making or his daily life. It
is a bizarre silence in a book of this type
and title.
The issue of Blair's religious beliefs
matters, because it bears on the ques-
tion of how he changed during his
time in office as a political leader. He
came to office as an exemplar of the
"third way" in politics, the Clinton-
like standard-bearer of a reinvented
political left that was determined to
listen more to the electorate than to its
own rhetoric. "Progressive parties are
always in love with their own emo-
tional impulses," Blair writes-one of
the infrequent moments where he al-
lows a glimpse of his inner chilly hard-
ness. He became leader of the Labour
Party in 1994, following the sudden
death of its previous head, John Smith,
and, rather than deferring to his col-
leagues, set out to make an "alliance
between myself and the public." He
ditched the Party's unpopular and un-
realistic legacy policies, such as the
commitment in its constitution to the
nationalization of major industries.
"We were getting a medium level of
media interest, which was rising in
regularity and usually pretty praisewor-
thy; we had definitely logged on with
the elite class interested in politics."
(Not all the writing in the book is as
horrible as that, but plenty is.) In 1997,
by positioning himself as a likable, un-
threatening, modernizing figure, Blair
won Labour-rebranded by him as
"New Labour"-its biggest-ever elec-
tion victory.
Blair's first moment in the global
spotlight came with the death ofPrin-
cess Diana, later that year. Blair knew,
liked, and, most important, got Diana:
understood her connection with the
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public, and the problem that this cre-
o
ated for the hidebound, rule-bound,
LU
emotionally constipated Royal Family.
He even saw something of himself in 8
her. "We were both in our ways ma- ð
nipulative people, perceiving quickly
'
the emotions of others and able in-
stinctively to play with them," he <S
writes. (That's another moment where
you feel the chill.) On the morning ð
after her death, a Sunday, he paused on